The last article I wrote for the other ones

I'm reading the last ever article I wrote for Charlottesville Tomorrow in May 2018. I had announced I would quit to work for the Piedmont Environmental Council. There's an entire backstory that seems to be still in the immediate foreground.

At play is who gets to control the narrative about land use and development in the community where I live and have also written about for many years. 

I don't have any insight at this time except to note that I wanted to just document this article. The Daily Progress didn't run it because my defection to an advocacy group was suspect.

There's so much in the article. I can't go into it all here. I don't know how it turns out yet. I don't want to control the narrative about any of this. I just do what I do to capture what I see, knowing full well you can't get to it all. I hope I'm doing an okay job. 

I do know if I felt free, I'd write an update based on this article. Five years later I've written about the process so much, and had a piece of new information no one else had reported in my newsletter. While most of my time is spent alone, I manage to still have a pulse on what's happening. 

I had that pulse because I put the time in. No matter what happened at Charlottesville Tomorrow in terms of who they are now, I spent my time there getting an education about public information for the benefit of the entire public. 

To what end?

Check back in five years and we'll see. 

The stickiness of grief

You would think by now I would be over it. You would think the loss I've had would be something I would have just moved past, grown through, evolved from.

But the hole in my existence pervades and is so wide and vast now that it seems to have its own signature and frequency. If anything happens in my life that reminds me of its existence, I will have to take time to sit with it.

I think about a friend of mine whose child died and she and her husband never had time to get to know their son. I look around and see memories everywhere that remind me of hope and possibility.

I hold out hope that there's a possibility that I'll feel whole again in some way. But I also know that each and every one of us born will face a series of challenges in their lives.

I am happy for the continued existence of the objects of my grief, but it doesn't make it any easier when the call of remembrance comes and I have to sit there for a moment and contemplate whatever error I caused. I cannot assign blame to anyone but myself. 

And then the vibrations of the reminded pain begin to fade, and I get through it another time. hoping so much I can withstand the emotions and direct them away from anger and sorrow. What happened happened. 

I am alive and these feelings are important to listen to. Plotting them out leaves notes in a life that one day may add up to something melodic. I cannot turn away from the light of hope, but I will always worry about what radiation it might bring that may affect my health. 

 

They line it up, we move it on

What could be said about a day in which the thoughts go up and down, like oil and water in a closed container? One can't know everything, and sometimes one just has to get through and remember how the barometer works. Pressure from the self can affect the ability to stay afloat, and you don't want to crash down fast, damaging it all forever.

At this moment there is a quality of being numb that is welcome. A great deal of things have happened this year, so many cards played and on multiple hands and it's been hard to remember what game is actually being played. 

Does it matter? 

Does any of it matter in these moments when you are finally numb enough to the anguish that you just let go and take stock of what you have and perhaps no longer respond to the stimuli that reminds you that your inventory was bare a long time ago.

Yet, there is still a cupboard and there are things that fit there. There will soon be more things there as life takes a new shape now that all of the dynamics have changed. That's what life is like. We humans are just these creatures who go through a now with an ability to know much more about what's happening than other species.

Right?

Do we know that for sure? Do we really even know who we are? Do I even know who I am? Does my conception of who I am even fit what others think of me? Does living a life of isolation warp you in ways that make your stories unrelatable, or do you stick to the formula as best you can in the hopes of constantly moving forward?

I deleted a bit from today's podcast about how this has been a summer of odd rhythm. I did it to save time, but also, the people who read the journalism I write don't need to know about all of my stuff. I let a lot through because at this point this is all I have. I want people to know I was alive and I want to keep telling the story of what I saw when I was along the way.

This has been the strangest year in a while. The pandemic-fueled isolation that allowed me to create my business got challenged by a whole of lot of obligations. There have been many challenges. 

I am grateful that I was able to find a way to remain calm when there are storms inside of myself. All of us have weather inside of ourselves that are worth reporting on. 

So.

Now what? 

Why do I still write in this space, one that began with another way for me to talk about the business things I wanted to do nearly 20 years ago. I'm the person who wrote all of that and then put a lot of it into action. 

But yet I'm not sure at all who I am. Why am I doing this? What's this all about? 

It's always good to have questions to answer by just keeping going, just keep strumming along, just feeling what you can feel as you move down a river you don't entirely get to control. 

I feel alive. Even in the moments I don't feel alive, I know I'm alive. Knowing is a kind of feeling. Knowing is also never necessarily certainty. We all just move along as our lives are lined up, seeking variations from whatever orbit we may have felt compelled to move upon if we didn't have our own free thought.

I feel alive. The oil and the water move around. I don't have to know what will happen. I just have to know that there is happening, all around me, and it's up to me to decide how I want to participate.

At least

For background when I'm writing, I've been watching the Amazing Race. I'm up to the 10th season, which was still in the late 2000's. The episode I'm now on is a bit chilling because they're about to get to Kiev, where a war still rages.

There really hasn't ever been peace in my time, with conflicts always raging around the world. I grew up fearing nuclear death at any moment if people much older than me got really mad at each other.

There hasn't been a lot of peace in my personal life due to poor relationship choices I made early on. I had no idea what I was doing. I still don't except to know it's important to mark the passage of time and not to become too nostalgic for anything that isn't the now.

I'm still trying to figure out a lot of things such as how to harness the deep peace within myself after deciding a long time ago to live in solitude. I can take this moment in and breathe another one out, all while making a living doing the exact work I've wanted to do my whole life.

At least I've got that going for me.

Catching up on the confession I have to make

This week I didn't get around to the Fifth District Community Engagement newsletter. I didn't say much about it on Substack. I can't always explain everything that is going on. 

I do like doing that newsletter, though. The idea, though, was to do it while my parents transitioned to a retirement community in Lynchburg. That ended up not taking, so they're now in Pennsylvania.

I'm still very much interested in doing the work of writing about what's coming up at meetings of local government in the Fifth District. This work is the culmination of my career, and I see so much potential in learning about that space. 

But now that my parents aren't there, I'm beginning to wonder if can sustain the energy for this work. 

These days, however, I don't let doubt in for very long. If I commit to something, I'm going to see it through.  I just need to be able to cut back when I need to to focus on the main event. This week's release of the draft zoning code took a lot of my energy. That's the main thing I want to write about, and I don't think I've had the capacity this year to do it correctly. I think my newsletter from Tuesday was okay for what it is, but I know I need to be doing more to explain what could happen. 

But hey, after I hit post I'm going to try to get the next set of stories written up and ready to go. This is what I do for a living and I seem to be able to organize my time to get it all moving forward, day in and day out. 

I'm grateful for the regular gnome. A reference that I hope I get in the future. I may not. That's the risk of being a weirdo. 

Back in Charlottesville

I've not wanted to be in Charlottesville for a while now and for most of this summer I got my wish. It doesn't seem like home to me and it always seems that everything is tense. I think this is the year I go away finally unless something happens to keep me here. 

But now that my parents are in Pennsylvania I feel like I should be closer to them. I'm having a hard time making Charlottesville any place that I care about at this point.

Which means I probably should go ahead and throw myself into work if I can. Let's see if that does the trick.